I just got the home server running on a dynamic dns server, and sure enough, we are already getting spam comments on the wordpress software I installed there. I knew our server wasn’t going to to go unnoticed when both Google and Yahoo found it Friday. But really, spam?

Not that this is going to be instructive, but about a month ago I thought that separating my technical blogging from my ‘life’ blogging would improve the clarity of my thinking. But it has not, it was a distraction, and a bit schizophrenic, and actually an inhibitor to posting. I can’t really separate my techie from my personal opinions. They are intertwined and interact on more levels than would seem, at first, to be evident. So in that vein, I was required to reintegrate the two blogs.

This looked easy, but since I had included all the posts from my three or four years of blogging, selected from each by their respective ‘slants’. It was not a simple dump and load of the MySQL database in which the content resided. So I downloaded the latest MySQL community server and various tools and recreated databases containing the two dumps from the blog databases and cross seeded them to patch them back together. Simple! Except that the original blog was wordpress 2.6.2 and I had built the second one as 2.7. Guess what, my original MySQL dump that included ALL the compied posts before the split, was a different schema from the the newer dumps. But owing to the fact that I’m a brilliant DBA, it only required two days of backbreaking, mind exercising MySQL learning to solve the issues 😉

Now I’ll never be a WordPress expert, but I actually liked the work. It’s refreshing to learn, that I can learn new things at my age. While I am an excellent Sybase DBA, and now feel very good about knowledge of MySQL also.

They just have to fix this one quibble or two I have with MySQL where it involves ……